Bay Area ‘genius grant’ recipients for 2019:...

1of6Walter Hood at his studio in Oakland. The public artist and UC Berkeley professor of landscape architecture is one of the 26 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship announced on Sept. 25, 2019.Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation /

2of6Walter Hood at the Bayview Opera House, one of his landscape architecture projects, in San Francisco. Hood is a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2016

3of6A detail from “Frame Refrain” by Mildred Howard and Walter Hood at the San Francisco Shipyard housing development in San Francisco, California on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2016. Hood is a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.Photo: Gabriella Angotti-Jones / The Chronicle

4of6Part of Frame Refrain is this three dimensional sculpture by Walter Hood at the Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco, as seen in 2015. Hood is a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

5of6sujatha baliga of Berkeley, is an attorney and restorative justice practitioner is one of the 26 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship announced on Sept. 25, 2019.Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

6of6Left: Walter Hood at his studio in Oakland. The public artist and UC Berkeley professor of landscape architecture is one of the 26 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship announced on Sept. 25, 2019.
Right: sujatha baliga of Berkeley, is an attorney and restorative justice practitioner is one of the 26 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship announced on Sept. 25, 2019.Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation /

Two East Bay residents who meld their professions with community activism are among this year’s 26 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship — the so-called genius grant that comes with a high profile and no strings attached.

One is Walter Hood of Oakland, a landscape architect whose work ranges from museum gardens to environmental artwork, increasingly with an emphasis on such societal scars as slavery and segregation. The other, Berkeley attorney sujatha baliga, is a pioneer in the movement known as restorative justice, which seeks to provide support to victims of crime while establishing alternatives to incarceration for offenders.

Baliga and Hood are part of a group that this year includes a marine scientist, a choreographer, a legal scholar and graphic novelist Lynda Barry. Each winner will receive $625,000 over a five-year period.

The fellowship, awarded by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is intended “to provide seed money for intellectual, social and artistic endeavors,” according to the website. There are no guidelines for how the money might be spent.

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Honors are nothing new to Walter Hood, 61, whose past accolades include the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. But that didn’t stop the founder of Hood Design Studio from being startled to get a heads-up that he would become one of the 1,040 “people of outstanding talent” to receive a MacArthur Fellowship since the program was established in 1981.

“Out of all these awards, the MacArthur is the one that really says you deserve recognition for everything you’re doing,” Hood said Monday. “I’ve taken risks in my career by being more spread-out than focused — people tell me I’m too scattered in my approach — so it’s good to receive validation.”

His landscape work in the Bay Area is varied — from the gardens at the de Young Museum that debuted in 2005 to Splash Pad Park near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, a neighborhood gathering place with a popular farmers market. He’s leading the design team for the renovations about to begin at Oakland Museum of California, and contributed a two-block-long parklet to Powell Street in San Francisco.

Increasingly, though, Hood has sought out projects that enhance and deepen the landscape rather than shape it.

In Nashville, his “Witness Walls” from 2017 is a sculptural installation that commemorates the civil rights movement. At a much smaller scale, his collaboration “Frame/Refrain” with Oakland artist Mildred Howard transforms a walkway along a steep ridgeline in Hunters Point Shipyard into an obliquely haunting procession.

Among his projects in the works are a memorial garden for the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. A sculpture in Arlington, Va., will form a tower from replicas of the badges that were required to be worn by slaves being rented out.

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The class of 2019

For information on the 26 recipients of the 2019 MacArthur Fellowships, as well as past winners and the grant’s history, go to www.macfound.org/fellows

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“At this point I would say I’m more of a public artist, though I still believe in the power of public places,” said Hood, who also is a professor in landscape architecture at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. “How do I give value to the landscape — that’s been my work during the past decade.”

sujatha baliga

When the director of the MacArthur Fellows program asked baliga to call her after the two met at an event, baliga spent hours putting together a list of people in the restorative justice field that would be worthy of the honor. But instead of going over her list, baliga was surprised to hear that she was being honored.

“The most exciting part about this recognition for me is that it really lifts up the approach my organization is taking towards restorative justice diversion and applying it to serious harms and crimes ... in a way that really lifts up the community and the community’s capacity to address harms,” she said. “That vote of confidence and lifting that up is huge.”

As the director of the restorative justice program at Impact Justice in Oakland, baliga works with communities across the country to build restorative justice diversion programs. Much of the program’s work is being done in Oakland, San Francisco and Contra Costa County, she said.

“Instead of asking what law was broken, who broke it and how should they be punished, restorative justice asks a completely different set of questions. It asks who was harmed, what do they need and whose obligation is it to meet those needs,” baliga said.

This method of restorative justice versus incarceration is key so that the individual can “start to make amends” and “turn their life around,” she added.

The 48-year-old started her career as a victim’s advocate and then worked as a public defender. She was inspired to pursue restorative justice after experiencing sexual abuse as a child.

“I had no interest in the solutions that the systems might have offered me,” baliga said. “I always knew that there needed to be a way that lifted up everyone in a situation like this.”

In the immediate future, baliga said she plans to use the grant money to pay off her student loans. But ultimately, she hopes to write books and create broader conversations surrounding restorative justice on a national platform.